Stirred Pots and Party Music

Comedy, R&B, hospitality, presidential politics, New Orleans party music, and Sith Lords will all touch down at Guild Hall in East Hampton this week, starting tomorrow at 9 p.m. when Jay Pharoah will perform his first comedy show on an East End stage.

A stand-up comic, actor, impressionist, rapper, and voice actor, Mr. Pharoah joined the cast of “Saturday Night Live” in 2010 and since then has perfected impressions of Barack Obama, Jay Z, Denzel Washington, Kanye West, and many other notables. His comedy special “Can I Be Me?” is available for streaming on Showtime, and he has appeared in several motion pictures, including Chris Rock’s “Top Five.” Tickets cost $45 to $100, or $43 to $95 for museum members.

Sunday’s guest for “Stirring the Pot: Conversations With Culinary Celebrities” will be Danny Meyer, the restaurateur who founded Shake Shack and whose Union Square Hospitality Group includes the Union Square Cafe, Gramercy Tavern, Blue Smoke, the Modern, and North End Grill, to name a few. Florence Fabricant, a food writer for The New York Times and the author of a dozen cookbooks, will interview Mr. Meyer about his remarkable career in hospitality and his active involvement in the fight against hunger. Tickets cost $15, $13 for members; $50 includes a reception with the speaker before the talk.

“Echoes of Etta,” a tribute to Etta James, a singer versatile enough to be in both the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and the Blues Hall of Fame, will take place on Sunday at 8 p.m. William Blake, a soul singer with a three-octave range, will channel Ms. James with a trio of backup singers and an all-star band under the direction of Michael Thomas Murray. Among the classics and covers from Ms. James’s repertory are “At Last,” “Tell Mama,” “You Can Leave Your Hat On,” and “Something’s Got a Hold on Me.” Tickets are priced from $40 to $75, $38 to $70 for members.

The Hamptons Institute will present “Presidential Politics,” a panel discussion of experts capable of shedding light on the quadrennial extravaganza, on Monday evening at 7.

Ken Auletta, an author, journalist, and media critic for The New Yorker, will moderate. The panelists are Howard Dean, a former governor of Vermont who spent summers in East Hampton as a youth and was a Democratic presidential candidate in 2004; John Podhoretz, a writer, editor of Commentary magazine, and former presidential speechwriter, and Katrina vanden Heuvel, a writer and publisher of The Nation. Audience members can watch rhetorical sparks fly for $25, $23 for members, and $500 adds a 6 to 7 p.m. reception beforehand and a dinner afterward with the speakers at a private home.

Live Stormtroopers and Sith Lords from the 501st Legion of the Empire City Garrison will be on hand for a screening of “Star Wars: The Force Awakens” on Wednesday at 8 p.m. Admission is $12, $10 if you’re a member.

If “Star Wars” fails to ease your anxiety about presidential politics, surely the music of the HooDoo Loungers and Mamalee Rose and Friends will cure what ails you, if only for one night, next Thursday night at 8. The Loungers are a nine-piece band that travels with the rhythms, sounds, history, and spirit of New Orleans, including jazz, brass band, classic R&B, and funk. Mamalee Rose and Friends is a six-piece band with two singers, Lee Lawler and her daughter, A. Rose Lawler. Their music ranges from gospel to R&B, from rock to blues.

Lilly-Anne Merat, a homegrown talent who now divides her time between Asheville, N.C., and New York City, will bring her own take on soul at the party. Tickets cost $27 to $40, $25 to $38 for members.

Guild Hall’s summer benefit will begin tomorrow at 5 p.m. with a private preview of the exhibition “Aspects of Minimalism,” followed at 7 by cocktails at the Mulford Farm on James Lane. Dinner, dancing, and a live auction, also at the farm, will begin at 8. Tickets, which start at $100 for cocktails only for young patrons and rise from there, can be purchased at guildhall.org.

The print version of this article referred incorrectly to the Hamptons Institute as a collaboration between the Roosevelt Institute and Guild Hall. The Hamptons Institute has no connection to the Roosevelt Institute.